Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

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Interpretation of the latent meaning of manifest content is the core of the traditional approach to psychoanalytic treatment. The main purpose of such interpretation is to enhance the patient's self-knowledge, in particular his or her awareness of unconscious wishes and their embeddedness in inner conflicts. An assumption of classical psychoanalysis is that veridical interpretations-as Freud put it, interpretations that tally with what is real in the patient-will be especially effective therapeutically. These basic assumptions have been called into question, as reflected in such concepts as "narrative truth" and the overriding importance of the patient's "assured conviction" regarding interpretations...

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The act of interpretation in psychoanalysis has a distinct character due to the discursive structure of the psychoanalytic setting. The discourse that issues from the interplay of the fundamental rule and evenly suspended attention is a reflection on reflection. The result is that interpretation instead of being a device for inquiry is itself the object of inquiry. Psychoanalysis does not use interpretation. It is about interpretation itself. This perspective sheds a certain light on longstanding questions about the form and effects of psychoanalytic interpretation...

Interpretation remains relevant in contemporary psychoanalysis and serves a crucial linking function between patient and analyst. Interpretation provides an important link with temporalities: the time of the analytic hour and the time of the patient's history as it unfolds in the present. Analysis, it is argued, is bounded by time and loss. Two case vignettes, presented from a Kleinian perspective, exemplify these propositions.

To patients, the most memorable moments in psychoanalytic treatment are seldom the contents of the analyst's interpretations, but the feeling of being understood. Interpretations are most meaningful not because of what they say but because each one is evidence that the analyst, who generally becomes someone of great significance to the patient, knows the patient more than before the interpretation was made. As a result of this process of "witnessing" patients not only know and feel-they also "know and feel that they know and feel...

Two distinct spaces can be seen as operating in a session-a private one in the analyst's mind, where formulations take shape, and one shared between patient and analyst, in which interpretations are offered. By maintaining a focus on the here and now in the latter space, taking care to protect it from intrusions from the analyst's theory except as hypotheses (in the form of interpretations derived from those formulations) aimed at eliciting unconscious responses that further the analytic inquiry, a basis for analytic work is established that aligns with ordinary scientific processes: theory is generated in the mind of the researcher, and hypotheses derived from it are tested systematically in a laboratory setting...

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Analysts seem spellbound by language when it comes to the word interpretation , a word so idealized and grand, so laden with fantasy, that the term itself continues to hold a magical sense that defies us to think about it. Called upon to do far too much explanatory work in psychoanalysis, it is accorded a variety of meanings. It is employed for varied uses, often simultaneously, making it hard to know what analysts mean when referring to "interpretation" and what uses they intend for it. Approaches to interpretation may be heuristically separated into those having to do with the content of the unconscious and those attempting to "use" interpretation in a manner still not divorced from content...

At a time when many questions are arising about the nexus between psychoanalysis and social justice, the writings of Hans Loewald open an avenue for broadened conceptualizations of psychoanalytic activity and the role of interpretation within it. The pursuit of social justice, it is argued, is integral to psychoanalytic ethics, and the relation between activists and society can be formulated in Loewaldian terms. Using Loewald, and considering case examples from social justice informed advocacy, direct action, and protest speech in AIDS activism, social justice activism can be understood as a spontaneously emergent psychoanalytic interpretation delivered by activists to their social surround, effectively accomplishing multiple forms of therapeutic action...

This paper examines the principal ideas from Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of psychosis. According to Lacan's theory in the 1950s, the central organizing element of symbolically organized mental life, the Name-of-the-Father, is missing in psychosis. That theory changes with later conceptual developments in Lacan's work that focus on the incompleteness of symbolic functioning. This connects with how, in his works from the late 1960s and the 1970s, Lacan embraces the idea of a fundamental non-rapport and symbolic non-existence at the basis of mental life...

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